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Oral History Interview with Juanita Kreps,
January 17, 1986. Interview C-0011. Southern Oral History Program
Collection (#4007)Series C. Notable North Carolinians. Southern Oral
History Program Collection (C-0011)Rob Amberg146 MbChapel Hill, N. C.Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill17 January 1986Oral History Interview with Juanita Kreps, January
17, 1986. Interview C-0011. Southern Oral History Program Collection
(#4007)Series C. Notable North Carolinians. Southern Oral
History Program Collection (C-0011)Juanita Kreps33 p.Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at
Chapel HillChapel Hill, North Carolina17 January 1986Interview conducted on January 17, 1986, by Lynn
Haessly; recorded in Durham, North Carolina. Transcribed by Ron Bedard. Forms part of: Southern Oral History Program Collection
(#4007): Series C. Notable North Carolinians, Manuscripts Department,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.Original transcript on deposit at the Southern
Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill.

The electronic edition is a part of the UNC-Chapel Hill digital library, Documenting the American South.

An audio file with the interview complements this electronic edition.

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Library of Congress Subject HeadingsDocumenting the American South TopicsEnglishWomen and Women's Roles North Carolina2007-00-00, Celine Noel, Wanda Gunther, and Kristin Martin revised TEIHeader and created catalog record for the electronic
edition.2006-05-10, Mike Millnerfinished TEI-conformant encoding and final proofing.
Interview with Juanita Kreps, January 17, 1986. Interview C-0011.
Conducted by Lynn Haessly

Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round
Wilson Library

Citation of this interview should be as follows: “Interview C-0011, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”

Juanita Kreps grew up in coal-mining Harlan County, Kentucky, but eventually made
her way to Durham, North Carolina, where she earned a Ph.D. in economics, and
Washington, D.C., where she served as Secretary of Commerce in the Carter
administration. In this interview, Kreps remembers a career, as she puts it, "of
proposing things before people are ready to accept them." Such things included
the notion that women should seek out satisfying careers, a proposal to extend
the age of eligibility for Social Security, and that day care should be provided
for working women. Kreps herself, a female academic during World War II and
already a professional success as women began to push for economic equality, was
ahead of her time. This interview provides a brief biography of a woman who made
a strong case for women's rights before the women's movement gained
momentum.

Short Abstract

Academic and Carter cabinet member Juanita Kreps describes her career as an
economist and as an early proponent of women's rights.

in her office on January 17, 1986. I was hoping
that we could begin with you telling about your parents and when and
where you were born.

JUANITA KREPS:

I was born in eastern Kentucky, Harlan County, which is a coal-mining
area of the state. My father was in the coal-mining business, first as
an accountant and later as a manager of a small, independent coal
mine.

LYNN HAESSLY:

What was his name?

JUANITA KREPS:

Elmer.

LYNN HAESSLY:

What was your mother's family back there?

JUANITA KREPS:

My mother's family were mainly farmers, although there were some
exceptions, one notable one being a county official who was in politics
during the period in which the unionization of the mines took place. He
was, I'm afraid, recorded as not being very sympathetic to labor. The
labor unions wrote a song about him.

LYNN HAESSLY:

What was his name?

JUANITA KREPS:

His name was John Henry Blair and Blair is my mother's maiden name.

LYNN HAESSLY:

I was going to ask you what memories you had had of the Harlan County
strikes when you were about ten.

JUANITA KREPS:

They are surprisingly vivid, I suppose because they were so dramatic.
There was a lot of bloodshed, as you know. I remember the scene as being
one of fear. Coal mining itself is physically, to me, still a
frightening business. I attribute my current claustrophobia to the
thought of being in a dark place such as a mine. So I remember it fairly well. It was a tough period for that area. Of
course, it was a depressed period all over the country. There was a lot
of true poverty in the area in which I grew up.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Did you feel as if your family was on one side or the other during the
strikes?

JUANITA KREPS:

Oh, yes. We felt aligned with the labor struggle with the exception of
Uncle John Henry. I think he was too, it's just that he was in a
political situation that was somewhat different. My father, although he
ultimately was in charge of a mine and had to bargain with the workers,
was basically very sympathetic to the problems that very low paid, hard
working miners were facing.

LYNN HAESSLY:

That song is "Which Side Are You On"?

JUANITA KREPS:

Right.

LYNN HAESSLY:

When you were very small, your parents divorced. Do you remember what
impact that had on you?

JUANITA KREPS:

I don't remember that very well because we stayed with my mother and my
father was nearby. That did not seem to have much impact. It was
unusual, in those days, for parents to get divorced and I suppose I felt
in that sense somewhat set apart. But, as I say, I had access to my
father so I didn't feel that I missed him in the usual sense.

LYNN HAESSLY:

What was your mother's name?

JUANITA KREPS:

Her name was Cenia Beair.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Did you have brothers and sisters?

JUANITA KREPS:

I have an older sister and three brothers between her and me and then one
brother younger than I.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Did you all live with your mother afterwards?

JUANITA KREPS:

Yes.

LYNN HAESSLY:

How did she make a living?

JUANITA KREPS:

We were supported by monthly payments from my father. She, however, had
grown up in a farm family and she continued to farm.

LYNN HAESSLY:

So you lived on a farm?

JUANITA KREPS:

For the most part, yes.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Did she run the farm herself?

JUANITA KREPS:

She and my brothers, yes.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Were they considerably older than you?

JUANITA KREPS:

Well, they ranged. My sister, who was the head of the family, is about a
decade older than I and then the three boys were in between us.

LYNN HAESSLY:

How big was the farm?

JUANITA KREPS:

Well, it varied. We never actually owned farms; we weren't in that sense
farmers. But at one point we ran a dairy, a small dairy, and at other
times we mainly grew foodstuffs for the family and the farm animals. But
it was never anything extensive.

LYNN HAESSLY:

So you would move from farm to farm often?

JUANITA KREPS:

We had several moves, yes.

LYNN HAESSLY:

When you were twelve you went to a boarding school. Why was that?

JUANITA KREPS:

It was a matter of convenience. My mother lived far enough away from a
high school to make it difficult for me to go by bus. The boarding
school was one of the Presbyterian Church's mission schools which was
actually near where my father was then working. I guess it was a matter
of my own desire to be in a better school than the public schools were,
in my view.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Did your older brothers and sister seek further education?

JUANITA KREPS:

No, no.

LYNN HAESSLY:

So you were unusual in your family?

JUANITA KREPS:

Yes.

LYNN HAESSLY:

How was your schooling paid for at the Presbyterian school?

JUANITA KREPS:

It didn't cost anything, as I recall. I don't know, my father may have
paid some small sums. But I think it was largely paid for by the
Presbyterian Church.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Now we read so much about divorced women having trouble supporting their
family. Do you remember that being a problem in your family?

JUANITA KREPS:

Oh, yes, it was a problem. It is hard to separate the reasons for the
low-income status of the people in that area. It was partly that there
was widespread unemployment, that mining was so underpaid, that the
whole economy was in very bad condition throughout the '30s. But, yes,
there is no question that being in a family without a father in those
days was an extreme problem.

LYNN HAESSLY:

What do you remember about your boarding school as an educational
experience?

JUANITA KREPS:

Only good things educationally. The teachers were first-rate and they
came from all over the South, and not Kentucky, by and large.

LYNN HAESSLY:

What was the name of the school?

JUANITA KREPS:

Stuart Robinson. It is no longer there but in its day was first-rate.
They had a good little library. The standards of performance were high.
I had always been a good student but that was the best chance I had to
dig in. Good teachers, as I say, and it was a reassuring time for me,
confirm a lot of interests that I had.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Was it difficult for you to be away from your family at that young
age?

JUANITA KREPS:

No, because they were nearby.

LYNN HAESSLY:

How far away was the school?

JUANITA KREPS:

From my father's office it was a short walk. It was farther away from my
mother, but I always got home for the holidays.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Was it the people at the school who encouraged you to go to Berea?

JUANITA KREPS:

Yes. They varied between wanting me to go to Berea or go to a
Presbyterian school. Presbyterian colleges, Flora McDonald in North
Carolina was one of the ones they recommended, but, of course, I
couldn't afford that and they were very supportive in helping me get
into Berea.

LYNN HAESSLY:

What do you remember about Berea in the '30s? What was the atmosphere
like there?

JUANITA KREPS:

Of course by then it was late '30s, into the '40s, so the national scene
was somewhat different from my early childhood. And again, only good
things. I have absolutely no bad memories of Berea—not in the classroom,
not with my peers. As you know, I'm a trustee of the college and have
been for a long time, with a time out while I was in Washington. I try
to help support them financially, help them raise money. Berea was a
place where equality and equal opportunity was taken for granted, even
in those days, long before it became so popular.

LYNN HAESSLY:

You mean between men and women?

JUANITA KREPS:

Between men and women and between races. It was a college formed after
the Civil War for the purpose of educating black and white and it
retained that legacy and that philosophy. It held notions of equal
opportunity between races, between sexes, and also opportunities for
youth from Appalachia who were by and large poor and who were isolated
geographically from the mainstream.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Would you have been there at the same time as Harriet , the novelist?

JUANITA KREPS:

The name doesn't sound familiar.

LYNN HAESSLY:

What work did you do at Berea as your co-op work?

JUANITA KREPS:

All of us did all sorts of things. My freshman year I remember only
washing dishes; then I worked for the college hospital as receptionist
and typist; then I worked for the drama department
where I did mainly costume shows; and my senior year I worked for the
economics department helping to grade papers, sort of apprenticing
myself to the top professors in that department.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Were they still doing farm work at the time that you were there?

JUANITA KREPS:

Oh, yes. The college still has a farm and a dairy. I didn't have anything
to do with that but they give a major in agriculture and the students do
in fact man the farm.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Was it at Berea that you developed the beginnings of your ambition?

JUANITA KREPS:

I don't know how one knows when aspirations arise. I suspect that I
always wanted to do better myself intellectually and financially than
the people around me. Actually, I grew up in somewhat better
circumstances in my family than lots of others but nevertheless it
didn't seem to me that that was the way things ought to be, not just at
a personal level but more for all the people that I was close to. The
whole community needed so many things done. So my interests in changing
things sociologically, economically must have formed perhaps even before
high schol.

LYNN HAESSLY:

When you first made your decision to go to Stuart Robinson?

JUANITA KREPS:

Yes. Although I don't remember that as a period of social integration
because it too was isolated and dwelt with learning
the basics, a lot of drill, a lot of emphasis on grammar and Latin and
tools which were, I guess, what high school was supposed to be.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Did you have particular teachers at Berea who urged you to go on to
graduate school?

JUANITA KREPS:

At Berea, oh yes. The economics department was very eager for me to go
ahead to graduate school. In fact, my coming to Duke was largely a
result of my major professor who had his Ph.D. from Duke.

LYNN HAESSLY:

And his name was?

JUANITA KREPS:

Rector Hardin.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Rector was his first name.

JUANITA KREPS:

Yes. And he had done Ph.D. at Duke under some of the men that I had later
studyed under.

LYNN HAESSLY:

At Duke you worked with Joseph Spengler and Frank Deviyver. Were they
your mentors to you?

JUANITA KREPS:

I think Frank Deviyver was a mentor in the best sense, although of course
we didn't know that word then. He was extraordinarily kind and
considerate and thoughtful about his students. I worked directly with
him. I did my dissertation under him. I helped him revise one of his
books. I think he would not have used that word, either, but I think he
took a keen interest in all his students, perhaps a special one in me
because I was around for a long time. Then of course when I rejoined the
faculty he was also very helpful. With Dr. Spengler, our relationship
did not develop until I came back and joined the faculty. I was just his student in graduate days. An inspiring man,
he was a brilliant teacher, for whom I have profound respect but whom I
never got to know really, until much later. After I had been on the
faculty for quite some time, we did some writing together. Then he was
extremely helpful but I never thought of him as a mentor so much as an
inspirational figure.

LYNN HAESSLY:

When you came to Duke you were very young but you got opportunities to
teach early on, and I think I've read that that was in part due to the
wartime demands for teaching. Did you see the war as a time of often
really expanded academic opportunities for women?

JUANITA KREPS:

Well, I didn't think of it in that way but one realization subsequently
has stuck with me. Throughout the women's movement, of which I consider
myself a part, amid complaints that we've all had against sex
discrimination, it has occurred to me that had I been a male in the
early '40s I would have been in the service. Being female I was allowed
to continue my education and that is a very important thing to remember.
I found it more difficult to get teaching jobs after I got out than a
man would have had and I often reminded myself that in fact getting my
Ph.D. may have been somewhat easier for me than for a man. So there were
some tradeoffs as I viewed it. And it is true that I was allowed to
teach sooner than usual because there were no men around.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Did you teach the V-12 students?

JUANITA KREPS:

No, I did not teach the V-12 students. I taught the regular
undergraduates who were then mostly women, of course. There were some
men on campus, some undergraduate males, but I mainly taught classes on
the east campus.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Which was Woman's College then?

JUANITA KREPS:

Which was Woman's College then, although there was no separation of
classes, you could take them either place, even then.

LYNN HAESSLY:

You met your husband on campus here during the war. Was he not subject to
the draft or was he older?

JUANITA KREPS:

He was 4-F because of a back disability. Actually I met him in Atlanta
when we were both working for the government in the summertime and then
he came to Duke to do his Ph.D.

LYNN HAESSLY:

What work were you doing in Atlanta?

JUANITA KREPS:

We were both working for the National War Labor Board.

LYNN HAESSLY:

What did you do for them?

JUANITA KREPS:

We were wage analysts. The problem we were trying to solve was that of
keeping down inflation, and our part of it had to do with developing
guidelines and seeing that wage increases would not spiral up too fast.
So we did analysis of appeals for relief from those rules to lift wages;
everybody was bidding for a short supply of labor.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Was that for a regional area?

JUANITA KREPS:

For the southeastern region.

LYNN HAESSLY:

When you left Duke, I'm interested to know how you and your husband
managed to arrange appointments at the same time in different
places.

JUANITA KREPS:

Well it varied, and it never worked out quite as we would have liked. It
wasn't any easier then than it is now to get two satisfactory academic
appointments. We left after we finished our preliminary exams, but
without having written our dissertations, to take teaching jobs. We each
got a teaching appointment in Ohio, but not at the same college.

LYNN HAESSLY:

You were at Denison and . . .

JUANITA KREPS:

. . . and he was at Mount—I want to say Mount Hermon but that is the
prep school—Mount something. And so for the first year we had only
weekends and vacation times together. Then after that year he got an
appointment to Pomona College in California and I left Denison without
any appointment because I wanted to write my dissertation. So we both
went to Pomona. I ended up teaching a couple of classes while we were
there. But that was a one-year appointment and we understood it as such.
So then we both came back to Denison and worked in the same department
for two years. Then he went to the New York Federal Reserve Bank as an
economist and I stayed on at Denison to finish out my appointment and
was there for a year, then joined him in New York and that's when we
started our family.

LYNN HAESSLY:

I was wondering if you could tell me something about having babies and
being a young working mother in New York in the '50s.

JUANITA KREPS:

Well, actually, I didn't have any full-time appointments when I was
having babies. I taught a class at a time or two classes at a time,
whatever I could manage. But I did it pretty much at my convenience from
the time of the first child—we had three very close together—really,
until they were pretty much in school. It was difficult to get help in
New York, so I could never have managed, or didn't think I could manage,
a full-time job. Anyway, I was pregnant all the time. But it was a
period in which I was mainly out of the labor force for all practical
purposes. I did edit a couple of books. When Clif left the Federal
Reserve Bank of New York to take an appointment at the University of
North Carolina, and we moved to Chapel Hill, Duke asked me to teach part
time. So I began teaching introductory economics, two, then three
sections of the same course. By then the kids were all in nursery or
other school and I could work that out. Gradually, as they got older and
into school I worked into a full-time appointment. But there were about
six or eight years there in which I was part time.

[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]

[TAPE 1, SIDE B]

[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]

LYNN HAESSLY:

Do you think that being out of the full-time work force for those years
hampered your career?

JUANITA KREPS:

I've been so fortunate with my career it is very difficult for me to have
any complaints about how it worked out. I think what it did was put me a
few years behind the level of achievement that many yound women expect
today. Of course, in those days women didn't feel the same pressure. But
Clif and I got our Ph.D.s at the same time and his progress up the
academic ladder always was five to ten years ahead of mine; we are about
the same age, as well. On the other hand I was able to do some writing
while I was at home. I never resented being out of the work force during
that time. Looking back on it, I must say I enjoyed it and I didn't feel
pressure the way I sense young women now feel.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Do you think that time outside of the work force helped you to focus your
research interest on women in the labor force?

JUANITA KREPS:

No, I don't think so because I didn't write anything on the women work
force problem until much later. Actually, I wrote Sex in the Marketplace
after I became dean of the Woman's College.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Which would have been '69?

JUANITA KREPS:

Yes. I don't remember whether it was published in '70 or '71. The
problems that we now all talk about only began to become academically
acceptable, and not quite that even, until the forces in society as a
whole—that is, the civil rights movement on back of which the women's
movement came—forced us to give attention to what
were some very pressing and intractable problems. So I don't claim any
early perception of that. My personal solution to those difficult
problems was to try to go ahead and do what I felt I could do no matter
what the rules were.

LYNN HAESSLY:

For yourself?

JUANITA KREPS:

For myself. And to try to convey to my students this same spirit that
working it out was an individual business. You didn't have to do a
career but if you wanted to, these were the options. Only later did we
begin to think about it in terms of what the societal constraints
were.

LYNN HAESSLY:

I've read that you had made speeches and made comments about women's
interests in satisfying employment even before Betty Freidan published
her first book. [The Feminine Mystique, in 1963]

JUANITA KREPS:

That is true. I was trained as an economist who was interested in labor
problems and it quickly became apparent that the woman aspect of it was
critical. I made some speeches which were, I suppose, pretty extreme for
their time. I did something at one point called "Six Cliches in Search
of a Woman" and I was trying to demyth a good bit of the rubbish about
femininity. And trying to say to the students that they were going to
want more than home and family; that satisfying work was important to
women. What were they going to do with their minds when they graduated?
It was never in the systematic and eloquent
fashion that Freidan did it but I must say it was much more pointed in
its references to work.

LYNN HAESSLY:

You've mentioned as we've been talking that you consider yourself a part
of the women's movement, and things I've read about comments you made at
the time of your Cabinet appointment were that you do not consider
yourself a feminist and you didn't like that word.

JUANITA KREPS:

Oh, no. I've heard women say that, but I have always considered myself a
feminist and I think my actions would bear that out. What happened at
the time of my appointment was an important exchange, I think, on the
question of qualified women. If you read the record you'll see that I
told the President, "you have to look harder for qualified women." I
don't know that the label, one way or the other, bothers me but it would
bother me to be viewed as someone who felt "feminist" was a bad
label.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Let's talk a little bit about your stint at Duke before you went on to
join the cabinet. You had a faculty position and then you became dean of
the Woman's College. I've read a quote from the time that you were in
the Cabinet saying that, "it's difficult to learn how to operate within
a structure when you've been left out." Did you feel any of those kinds
of problems when you were moving into the administration here at
Duke?

JUANITA KREPS:

I don't think so; I don't remember that I did. Of course, the dean of the
Woman's College was always a woman's job so you were hardly breaking any
new ground. The Woman's College was, I think,
marked for extinction even before I was appointed. Not in any
deliberately vicious way, the pressures were on to conserve, to combine.
Undergraduate women didn't like being segregated. There were all sorts
of pressures. When I was offered the position I questioned the provost
closely as to whether he really wanted another dean of the Woman's
College; it looked to me as if it were a period of rapid change. He
responded that yes, for a while at least, they did in fact want a
Woman's College. I just happened to be there to preside over the merger.
So I didn't think of myself as entering the ranks of the administration
in any central sense. I did a bit of that later when I became
vice-president, but that was very short-lived and not something that had
any great substance to it.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Let us talk a little about your resignation as the dean. I've read the
letter that you gave publicly and you talked about not wanting to
interfere with the study of the proposed merger of the Woman's College
with the male campus and that you didn't want personalities to be
involved. I was puzzled about what that meant.

JUANITA KREPS:

What was happening was, as a part of the student unrest, was a good deal
of pressure from the vocal women students to do away with the Woman's
College. They viewed us in part at least as kind of an oversight body
that they could do without. It was the days of the coeducationalization
of the dormitories, and so on. At the faculty
level, there were all sorts of discussions of restructuring
undergraduate education and a great deal of furor over what to do about
the Woman's College. I saw it shaping up as a somewhat painful but
necessary rethinking of undergraduate education. I thought that if I
continued in my role it would impede that discussion because I had a lot
of friends on the faculty who would interpret my position as being in
jeopardy and I didn't want that to happen. I liked being dean of the
Woman's College but there were lots of other things that I wanted to do
and I didn't want to be the one who held up the process. What I did do
was poll the alumnae of the Woman's College to ask them how they felt
about it. They were heavily, heavily, heavily against the dissolution of
the college and I presented that information to the administration. But
it would happen anyway, as had earlier predicted it would happen. I
stayed on as dean until most of the basic administrative decisions were
made that year.

LYNN HAESSLY:

How soon afterwards were you appointed vice-president?

JUANITA KREPS:

I think just a couple of years.

LYNN HAESSLY:

So there wasn't any understanding that there was a tradeoff.

JUANITA KREPS:

Oh, God, no! I went back to being a professor of economics.

LYNN HAESSLY:

And then got the James B. Duke Professorship.

JUANITA KREPS:

Yes, and got the Duke Professorship. And that, I thought, was much more
important to me than the vice-presidency.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Was that a tradeoff?

JUANITA KREPS:

You mean in the sense of an understanding? No.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Or, something to reward you with because of having given up another
important position.

JUANITA KREPS:

I think not at all. They didn't ask me to give up the position. I would
have had to give it up in any sense if they dissolved the college, which
clearly was in the works. No, I think I had earned that professorship. I
had written the books and published the articles and done the teaching.
And the fact is that the James B. Duke professors are appointed on
recommendation from their peers, from the other James B. Duke professors
and it does not come as a gift from the administration.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Let me ask you, then, about your Cabinet appointment. Before Carter was
elected, had you ever hoped to serve in the government in that sort of
capacity?

JUANITA KREPS:

I had never given it any thought. I had done a lot of research and
writing under government grants and so I knew people at the secretarial
level and below. But it had never occurred to me that I might be doing
that some day.

LYNN HAESSLY:

As I mentioned before, I've read about you having talked about your
difficulty in learning how to be an insider in Washington when you'd
been an outsider. What kinds of things did you do
to help you be effective in that kind of position?

JUANITA KREPS:

I don't remember the inside-outside discussion. What I remember as being
a major problem was learning the substance of the job; learning all the
agencies that I was responsible for and what the law says those agencies
are supposed to do, and the problem of getting good people to head them;
the budgetary problems of running a large department; the congressional
liaison work that one must do; the difficulties of working with other
members of the Cabinet, the kind of internecine stresses that go with
that; getting to know the President and trying to interpret his
philosophy on the work. Those were, I thought, the burdens of the job
and the challenges. The inside-outside thing I can't speak to because we
were all in the Carter administration—not quite all but by and large—a
new bunch of people. Take out Joe Califano and Jim Schlesinger, and
around the table you had a lot of new people.

LYNN HAESSLY:

There was the question of being inside or outside within the
administration, not being of the Georgia group who traveled with the
President.

JUANITA KREPS:

Oh, that. I don't know what remark you were referring to but I never felt
that the Georgia people were in and I was out. I felt very close to the
President, as a matter of fact. He has the capacity to bring people in
and I thought I had as good a rapport and was as good a friend with Mr.
Carter as anybody in the Cabinet. And I got along
extremely well with Jody Powell and Ham Jordan. They treated me with
deference because I was considerably older than they, and respect, and I
can't remember any time I came to blows with them.

LYNN HAESSLY:

At the time that you were asked to leave the economics breakfast group,
there was a certain reading in the press that that was a way of pushing
you out of the inner circle. Your comments at the time seemed to be that
you thought very much otherwise and that you did not feel excluded.

JUANITA KREPS:

Well, there were different things that happened at different times, so I
guess it depends on the specific instance. You start from the fact that
the Secretary of Commerce has never been an economist before. I had
hoped that, since I was an economist and since most of the data on the
basis of which policy rests emanate from the Commerce Department—we have
the national accounts and we provide the numbers—that would allow me to
be in the relatively small group who discussed economic policy. And I
think it started out that way. The exclusion from that very small, three
or four-person group that met regularly—the secretary of the Treasury,
the OMB director, the chief economist from State—that was as much an
exclusion based on the fact that I was secretary of Commerce as it was
that I was a woman. What I tried to say was that I didn't feel that that
was sex discrimination, it was an anti-Commerce Department segregation.
As it turned out, some of the decisions made by
the group were, I thought, not good decisions, and I was just as happy
not to have been in on them. But by the time I left we were all meeting,
perhaps ten of us, at breakfast once a week and worrying about the
dollar, which was then of course going down instead up against other
currencies. And worrying about the budget, worrying mainly about the
rate of inflation. So, in the final analysis, there were some exclusions
that annoyed me. But I felt it was offset by an easy access to the
President.

LYNN HAESSLY:

From what I've read about your term in Commerce, I think that one thing
that seemed very important to you was to try to bring social concern
into that department with the social performance index that you proposed
for businesses, the proposal you made that was critical of the HUD
policies, and a few other things like that, and in some of those things
you were stymied, and some not.

JUANITA KREPS:

Yes. I had the unhappy experience there, as I have elsewhere, of
proposing things before people are ready to accept them. The classic
case was my argument with HEW, under whom Social Security resides, that
they ought to extend the age of eligibility for Social Security very,
very slowly. Everybody hopped on that and I got hundreds of hate letters
to show that a lot of people really don't want to work any longer than
they have to. I knew that, of course, it just didn't seem to me that
there was any way around it, and still maintain decent Social Security
incomes. Anyway, I was proposing adding two months a year over a
fifteen-year period, or something like that. So I
took a lot of flack for that. Now, that is in fact what we are doing. So
I was just five or six years early.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Why do you think you have been early in your proposals?

JUANITA KREPS:

Well, in the case of Social Security, I had been studying the economics
of aging for a decade, and I'd given a lot of thought to the subject and
I just made the mistake of thinking that, because I understood the
problem and saw what was inevitably going to have to happen, that other
people were with me. It was great misjudgment on my part. In other
cases, in women's case, I was not alone, of course; lots of women were
writing and thinking and talking. But I had been building a career for a
long time, and I knew what some of the problems were. It's a matter of
understanding because you are there, you see the changes and you
exaggerate how fast they will take place. I've always thought change
would come faster than it has come.

LYNN HAESSLY:

And has that frustrated you?

JUANITA KREPS:

Well, it's been an embarrassment because I've been left hanging out
there. But it also is reassuring because if you are wrong people aren't
going to follow your advice, you are saved. You could be proposing
something pretty ridiculous and, if people won't buy it, there is a
safety valve.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Some of the things you had talked about as being important
issues—national day care for working women—is that the sort of thing
that you see coming at all?

JUANITA KREPS:

Inevitably.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Any idea of how soon?

JUANITA KREPS:

No, it'll come in bits and pieces, though. But, you see, it wasn't very
long ago that American firms didn't want to talk about it. Now a lot of
them are sponsoring it, a lot of others are talking about it. They have
discovered they need those bright young women, they want to keep them on
the job, they are willing to put some thought and money into it. A lot
of the women have discovered they don't want that kind of day care for
their children, of course, and that's fine, too. But for low-income
women to work, it is a necissity. Just as lots of other things that
business early on didn't want any part of, are now espoused: helping to
find jobs for two people instead of just one; understanding that work
can take place at different hours of the day; that there is such a thing
as the half-time person who nevertheless is working her way up the
ladder, just as if she were a full-time person—all of these things are
happening. So five years from now we will see a difference.

LYNN HAESSLY:

What would you assess as your major accomplishment in the Cabinet?

JUANITA KREPS:

Negotiating the trade agreement with China. A very successful public
works program the first year I was there. Battling
through some of the early problems of the decennial census, which
actually took place after I left. A lot of focus on international trade
problems, particularly with the Japanese.

LYNN HAESSLY:

The Arab boycott, also?

JUANITA KREPS:

Yes. Working our way through a successful Arab boycott bill. Mainly in
the trade area, I feel good about what we did. However, a lot of the
problems that I'd hoped to solve did not get solved, and still aren't in
the trade area.

[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]

[TAPE 2, SIDE A]

[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]

LYNN HAESSLY:

In the trade area, what are the issues that you had hoped to solve and
haven't been solved yet?

JUANITA KREPS:

The basic problem is our inability to accept, understand, appreciate the
internationalization of the world economy. And because we don't
appreciate the different kinds of governments we are dealing with—many,
many of which are not laissez-faire capitalistic economies, many which
subsidize their industries in order to promote exports—because we fail
to take these things into account, we are somewhat naive about how trade
flows will occur. We remain completely addicted to free trade, on the
basis of doctrines which presumed different competitive situations from
the ones we actually have. And, therefore, we make mistakes in dealing
with other nations, the communist nations as well as the other
industrial countries, notably Japan. So I think our poor understanding
of what is happening in the world economy and our willingness to act on
the basis of an unrealistic appraisal of how other people do business is
the heart of the problem. It was then, it is now, it has not changed
much. Commerce Secretary Malcolm Baldrige is battling the same dragons
that I battled and with not very much improvement. In fact, in some ways
I think we have gone backward.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Those are essentially the disappointments that you see during the ongoing
problems with trade.

JUANITA KREPS:

I wouldn't characterize it as a disappointment. I would characterize it
as broadening of my understanding in how government works and does not
work, and a greater appreciation on my part of the inability to solve
those problems until the public generally, and even the specialists in
the field, have a better appreciation of what the problem is. So, after
a stint in government at this level, one is not so much disappointed as
he or she is discouraged with the progress that can be made and the pace
at which it can be made. There are no magic solutions, and many of the
problems that we are dealing with in the trade area can only be
mitigated; there is no mathematically perfect, easy, simple solution.
One of the difficulties I have with the current Reagan administration is
its tendency, particularly on the part of the President, to express
problems and solutions in simplistic terms.

LYNN HAESSLY:

The way you have conceptualized this program you have talked about and,
you had mentioned before about how you have ideas for policy often
before people are ready to accept them.

JUANITA KREPS:

That makes me sound awfully vain and I don't mean it to be so.

LYNN HAESSLY:

But not just for yourself but for other policy leaders, and you had
mentioned Social Security. Is that same conceptualization also something
you would extend to what we've talked about—the problems of women in
work—that policy leaders can see solutions before
the public is ready to accept them?

JUANITA KREPS:

So your question has to do with whether we could extrapolate this to the
case of women.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Well, from trade to just policy in general.

JUANITA KREPS:

I see. It's a generic proposition, I think, that holds. The academic or
other students of a problem obviously understand its dimensions in a
theoretical sense long before he or she can actually lay out any
pragmatic way of solving it. And that explains the big gap between
academia and government or academia and business. We perform different
functions. But, if you study a problem carefully over a long period of
time and if you observe what is going on in the society, you can often
predict what's about to happen. You inevitably say if we would only do
this, it would not solve the problem necessarily, but it would lessen
its impact. It would help this group of people, the cost would be
thus-and-so and you can afford those costs, and so on. And I think that
does cut across different areas. The impracticality of some
academicians' solutions—political impracticality—gives academicians
rather a bad name. But they get a much worse name in their
recommendations for what business should do, because there is an even
bigger gap, as I see it, between academic economists' analyses and the
business sector's studies than between academic analysts and the
government because Business moves much faster; business can't study a
problem in the depth that academicians expect;
therefore, business solutions are never the perfect ones that the
economists want. Problem-solving takes place at different levels. There
is an idealized model-building solution technique which is what most
academicians engage in. There is, at the other extreme, the
seat-of-the-pants, the quick-and-dirty solution, which often is the only
one that can be used because, if you are having a flood today you don't
have time to worry about irrigation to prevent the next one. If you are
caught in an immediate crisis, the solutions call for speed, not
perfection. And then there is something in between when business tries
to get the best information it can but has to make a decision in fairly
short order, otherwise somebody else takes the market and RUNs away with
it. I guess if I had to express my strongest drawback, as I analyzed my
work in the Commerce Department, it is that I tended to be too academic.
I wanted to know more about the subject than I had time to learn. And
there were so many different problems all at once that I was frustrated
in trying to understand them better than the time allowed.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Even working eighteen-hour days.

JUANITA KREPS:

Absolutely. That is not
much of an exaggeration because, of course, one can't sleep if some
pressing problem is there. You might as well stay up and read that huge
stack of books and hope you find something that gives you a clue. But
the learning curve is straight up. I never learned so much, so fast—not
when I was in graduate school, not ever. I learned
it in part with the help of some very bright young people who worked
with me. There is a tendency to underestimate the quality of the
bureaucracy. A lot of it is awfully, awfully good.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Let me turn and ask you something about your resignation from the Cabinet
and your work since then. Of course, you had pressing family concerns at
the time that you resigned.

JUANITA KREPS:

Right.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Would you still say that those were solely your reasons for resigning at
that time?

JUANITA KREPS:

Absolutely. I would have lasted four years although it did not pain me
that much to leave because I felt I had done pretty much what I could
do. The fourth year of an administration is a campaign year.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Would you have campaigned?

JUANITA KREPS:

Of course, of course. You owe that to the President. How well I would
have campaigned is a different question. I've never done it so I'm not
sure I'd be any good at it. But I would have done it. That is not,
however, what I would have liked to spend my time doing. In any event,
what was going to happen in the fourth year of the administration was
pretty much in place.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Why did you decide to come back to Duke when you left?

JUANITA KREPS:

There were alternatives, obviously, in industry and in administration in
other universities. I came back in part because of
the Duke Endowment invitation, which I wanted very much to accept. I
realized how important it was to this area and to Duke University and I
have a strong commitment to Duke itself. And I thought I could do some
other things, such as helping to raise money for the university, that
could be quite even critical to its future. It was also the place where
I had roots and where Clif and I were both comfortable. And I've been
glad that I did it. I could have become president of another university.
I didn't want to be a president.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Which one?

JUANITA KREPS:

There were several possibilities. But I did not want to be in academic
administration at the time because I wanted to return in part to private
industry and I wanted to be able to pick up on some of the boards of
directors I had resigned from and I wanted to get a better look at the
private sector. So when I weighed it all out, I thought, given my
interest in Duke and in the possibility of pursuing that and still
having time for the private sector, it seemed the best thing to do. And
I have been very happy with the decision.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Why did you choose not to teach?

JUANITA KREPS:

Time, just an allocation of priorities. I'd been doing it since I was
twenty and I thought that was long enough.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Would you have liked to have been president at Duke one day, have the
recent change-over in administrations?

JUANITA KREPS:

No. I said so from the beginning, not that it was ever offered to me, but
I never would have done it.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Do you see yourself going back into political or public service
again?

JUANITA KREPS:

It seems unlikely. I would certainly not like to interrupt the pattern
I've set in industry now, which is, I guess, about as broadly based as
you can get. I do ten corporate boards and I work hard at each of them.
I've learned more than I contribute, I fear, but that and the Duke
Endowment and some lecturing and writing are enough. I hope I can do
some serious writing as soon as some of the corporate boards cool down a
bit. But I can't imagine that going back into a Cabinet, say, would have
that much appeal.

LYNN HAESSLY:

It was a very brutal life.

JUANITA KREPS:

I don't mind that. I like the work. In fact, I was eager to get to the
office at seven in the morning. It isn't the grueling part; it's just
that the alternatives open to me now are really very exciting and I like
what I'm doing. It sounds, I suppose, a bit diffused if one doesn't have
a fancy title or a big, highly visible job. I suppose to some that's a
comedown from being a Cabinet officer. I have never sought a visible
role. I would much prefer to be left alone to do my work. I can think of
nothing worse than being a highly visible political figure forever. Nor
would I like being president of a university which
has many of those difficult day-to-day burdens. It might be exciting to
be an ambassador somewhere. That would be different, and one might be
willing to put up with a lot to do it. But I think it's unlikely to
happen.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Why don't you want to be visible and why don't you mind a grueling
life?

JUANITA KREPS:

I don't think of hard work as a grueling life but a satisfying one. I
think those of us who work long hours do so because we like terribly
much what we are doing. We're drawn to it; we work long hours because
working is more fun than anything else. Why do I mind being visible? I
think visibility can be quite damaging to one's sense of perspective. It
would be very easy if you were a member of the President's Cabinet, say,
to come to believe that people defer to you because what you are saying
is important. They may treat you with great deference. It would be easy
to begin to believe that you had earned that; that you were in fact
pretty smart and that those were in fact brilliant ideas you espouse.
Nonsense! The test is not how you are treated, which is the visibility
part of it. The test is whether the idea is workable, whether it helps,
whether it moves things along. And I think I've always been a little bit
surprised that people enjoy the limelight. I'm not talking about the
people who want to do a good job and accept the limelight as a necessary
part of that, but people who want recognition irrespective of whether it
is important to doing a job. One has to confront
himself or herself on the quality of work, its effectiveness, its
thoughtfulness, and clarity of purpose, and integrity. I think it is
very hard to do that when you are in a public job. I think that is the
reason.